Prepaid cards, gift cards, and other similar financial products (generally referred to herein as “portable consumer devices”) are increasingly common in the retail and service industries. However, certain impediments and inconveniences of prepaid card systems present themselves. For example, the LOAD and ACTIVATE transactions conventionally used to fund and issue a prepaid card to the user and the point of sale (POS) terminals for issuing such prepaid cards are relatively new. Many merchant networks lack the ability to easily integrate these new transactions at the point of sale terminal without upgrading terminals or completely replacing these terminals. The additional investment in the network to allow loading and activation of prepaid cards at the POS can be a deterrent to the merchant or retailer wanting to participate in prepaid programs.
Consider, for example, a scenario where a large quick service restaurant (QSR) chain desires to pilot prepaid cards at its franchise restaurant locations. Suppose the QSR has hundreds of locations and desires to integrate prepaid cards in a short period of time, while wanting to reduce the time to market and the initial investment to create a pilot program. The pilot program could be used to determine if prepaid cards were a sufficiently viable product with the QSR's business model as to justify the time and money to proceed with a terminal upgrade and centralization of the POS (Point of Sale) system to support prepaid cards in the future.
An immediate upgrade to the POS system is not a practical solution given the cost and time constraints to bring the pilot program to market. Additionally, each franchise location for this particular QSR operates as an independent corporation in partnership with the QSR, with the independent franchise acquirers maintaining their own POS terminals and merchant acquirer relationship. Typically, the QSR is not able to control the acquirer and so a solution that works within the existing transactions and method of transaction processing infrastructure of the various acquirers is needed.
Another example is the inconvenience of having to manage a potentially large inventory of prepaid cards. Conventional prepaid cards are manufactured by the card manufacturer in fixed denominations. A card manufacturer prints indicia on the card that indicate the monetary amount. The text “$20” can be printed on the card to indicate a $20 value, or an image of a snowman might be printed on the card as a representation of the value of the card, and so on. Card issuers therefore are restricted, in practice, to limited numbers of denominations of prepaid cards. For example, a card issuer desiring to sell prepaid cards in $10 increments from $10 value cards to $1000 value cards would have to pre-order card stock for each of one hundred card denominations. This becomes a very expensive undertaking, and so the merchant or retailer is likely to order card stock in card denominations of only $25, $50, $100, for example, in order to keep his prepaid card inventory manageable. The lack of flexibility in specifying dollar value denominations in current conventional prepaid cards may be viewed as a limitation of the usefulness of prepaid cards.
These and other problems are addressed by embodiments of the invention, individually and collectively.